Small and Medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are a huge, essential part of our economy. Over half of all sales in the U.S. come from small businesses, which collectively employ around 56 million people. Still, it’s a struggle to run a small business, and being successful with limited resources is a continual challenge. Moolah, authorities in offering credit card processing for small businesses, also dedicate ourselves to helping out in the areas in which small businesses struggle most.
One such area of struggle is invoicing. A majority of small businesses tend to cling to the old standbys of paper checks and Excel to make sense of their invoicing, accounts payable, and accounts receivable (AP/AR). These old standbys have slowly faded into the background of functionality when compared to the wide range of software solutions that power businesses forward with automation. The overarching goal of automations in AP/AR is to add better understanding, and more security, to the all-important cash flow.
Some number crunching by the Association for Image and Information Management (AIIM) revealed that cash flow is hard for many organizations to predict, with around 22% of businesses achieving just 5% accuracy for forecasting mid-term cash flow. Automation can help here. How much does it cost your business to generate an invoice? If you’ve been informally putting invoices together, it can be hard to put a dollar value on the work, but it’s a helpful number to think about. In fact, it may surprise you. A report by Concur pegged the cost of a manually written invoice, on average, at $12.90 each.
But that’s not all. Think of the time it takes to prepare and mail these invoices. Think about the time spent catching and fixing errors, and the added expense of making exceptions. If you’re still doing paper-based invoices you know how much of a time and money suck it can be. When businesses implement automation, they can expect a sizable reduction in invoicing costs. The same Concur report indicated that the average savings was 29%. This translates to an easy investment that can very quickly pay for itself within a year.
Even if you feel that your operation is too small to greatly benefit cost-wise from automation, the truth is you stand to save a huge amount of time, thus freeing you up to pursue greater growth for your business in any number of other ways. As a small business, every hour of work, for every employee, matters. For smaller teams, automating all that recurring busy work is an essential tool for gaining the bandwidth to break through to the next level.
Breaking through to the next level is exactly what Moolah aims to do for our clients. The Authorize.net gateway that Moolah provides can automate a wide range of tasks associated with AP/AR, resulting in big time and money savings. This, matched with the superb credit card processing for small businesses that a dedicated merchant account from Moolah provides, enables SMBs to get hooked up with the tools they need for the next level of growth and success.